Read our latest daily deep dives, hot takes, and exciting updates about the entertainment world. Check out the latest insight from your favourite analyst, or search by coverage areas - music, entertainment and fandom, creator economy and social.

Data Says: E-sports Events Are More About Live Entertainment than Gaming

Karol Severin
Imagine you’ve got three behaviourally defined consumer segments: PC Gamers Console Gamers Live concert goers Which group is most likely to attend an e-sports event? Intuitively, it has to be Gamers, right? …WRONG! Data from the Q1 MIDiA Research survey across the US, UK, Canada, Australia, Germany, Sweden, France, Netherlands, Japan, Mexico, Brazil and India (n=12,000) states that 5% of gamers attend e-sports events, compared to a 3% all-consumer average.
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The Mouse That Roared; Disney Calls Time on Traditional Pay-TV and Netflix in the US

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Tim Mulligan
As  predicted , Disney has decided to flip the switch and unleash a pay-TV (and Netflix) killer by announcing a Q4 bundle of its streaming services in one joint aggressively-priced offer. On November 12 th , 2019 when Disney launches its new direct-to-consumer (D2C) service Disney+, it will be possible to subscribe to a bundled version of Disney+, ESPN+ and Hulu’s ad-supported tier all in one offering for $12.
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Will Content Fragmentation Drive a New Rise of Piracy?

Hanna Kahlert
The digital content marketplace largely has peer-to-peer content piracy to thank for the behaviours and dynamics characterising it today. Piracy itself was the forefront of the new era, quickly being overtaken by legitimate streaming services, which also challenged – and continue to challenge – long-held traditional methods approaching irrelevancy given new technological capabilities available on the market.
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YouTube is Monetising Fandom Through Subscriptions

Amanda Stears
YouTube is no stranger to subscription models; it had 53 paid channels in 2013 with monthly subscriptions priced from $0.99-$2.99. Four years later, the paid channels were discontinued with YouTube stating in its blog, “This service offered monthly subscriptions for some channels, but with less than 1% of creators using it today, it never achieved popularity with creators or users”.
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The State of the Music Publishing Nation 

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Hanna Kahlert
This blog highlights some key points from MIDiA’s latest flagship report, the State of the Music Publishing Nation . Now that streaming is settling into its role as the de-facto mode of consumption (contributing to 50% of music industry revenues last year), the acceleration of publishing growth is becoming more apparent, with increased growth rates for the past three years.
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Sports and Sponsorships: MLB Seeks Revenue Home Run

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Alistair Taylor
Major League Baseball (MLB) could finally allow for sponsorship patches appearing on its teams’ uniforms, the league confirmed to the Sports Business Journal . US sports have historically steered clear from patch sponsors on game day apparel, until 2006 when the Major League Soccer’s Real Salt Lake became the first US professional sports team to allow front-of-shirt sponsorship to the tune of over $500,000 from nutritional supplement supplier XanGo.
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